Archive for May, 2009

WARNING: Bachelor in the kitchen – So why this blog anyway?

So why am I doing this blog, anyway?

Well it’s a bit of a long, convoluted story: I am one of those guys who has to cook for himself (awww) but even though I fend for myself I have never had a strong urge to learn more than is necessary to avoid starving. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t order take out five times a week but I am guilty of relying on frozen dinners of various types way too often in the past.

Ironically, I became interested in (easy) cooking almost by accident. I was up late one night watching one of those home shopping channels (that many people consider ‘evil’, lol) when they started talking about some new fangled Rival Crock Pot slow cooker : it was not just a crock pot, however, no it was a new model of programmable, electronic Crock Pot! It had bells and it had whistles. Anyway, during their display and presentation of this modern marvel they showed how easy it is to cook with this thing – you know, they had the ingredients there and showed how to throw them all together and get them cooking. I have to admit it looked pretty damned easy, easy enough that even I could – well you get the idea. Anyway, I soon changed channels and all but forgot about that interesting little interlude. A couple days later however, I was chatting to a coworker and the subject of cooking came up and I mentioned seeing this thing on the TV about the crock pot and asked if it really was worth while and as easy as it had seemed on the shopping channel. To my surprise, my coworker started raving about her crock pot and how it made her meal preparation efforts so much easier. She told me that it made a real difference in preparing meals for her family. So of course now I was really intrigued: easier meal preparation? That sounded like something I could benefit from Letting my dinner cook itself without having to be home? Yeah, I could get used to that.

Not long after I was out shopping and saw a good sized crock pot (6.5 quart size) on sale at one of the larger department stores in my area; the crock pot that caught my attention was the steel finished model (its model number was 64451LD-C) and it came with a bonus “little dipper crock”.

Soon after I was getting ready to experiment with some of the easier recipes mentioned in the manual when I decided to surf the net and find some even easier recipes to cut my teeth on. I found some really good ones and soon after that I was cooking honest to God meals in my new Crock Pot! I found myself so self satisfied with my efforts that I started slipping the subject into many of my conversations. Well there is only so much that the people around you want to here about your fledgling victories with the crock pot, and after a while I found most of the guys desperately trying to change the subject whenever it turned towards cooking and my new found slow cooker habit. I guess when the guys get together to play a good old game of poker they don’t want to be distracted by discussions of Rival crock pot parts or slow cooking. When trying to decide whether to hold ‘em or fold’em, no one needs to also be considering the dilemma of ‘low heat or slow heat?’, as well.

Well I still felt that I could use an outlet to share my new found love of easier meal making, and I had recently started searching out info on the whole field of slow cooking on the internet and at the same time I had become aware of blogging and its accessibility, so low and behold I stumbled into this here blog. So now I have an outlet or venue for my new found minor passion/hobby.

Consider yourselves warned, there is a bachelor in the kitchen!